Read Chapter 12: — I AM NOT MYSELF

“I am not myself,” Li told a group of trainees.

One of them frowned.

“That sounds psychiatric.”

“It means stop treating your first interpretation as sacred.”

He used cases to explain. A prostate lesion that looked malignant might be inflammation. Bone abnormalities might be trauma rather than metastases. A frightening scan could trap the clinician who decided on the answer before asking the question.

“Your first self wants to be right,” Li said. “Your better self wants to know what is true.”

The phrase spread through the department.

Then it returned to Professor Zou.

Li’s private table of dates had grown.

Surgery days: quiet, precise, technically brilliant.

Committee days: combative, vain, punitive.

Occasions when difficult procedures unexpectedly changed schedule: vague excuses, delegation, disappearance.

Qin found the notes.

“Be careful,” he said. “You are turning personality into pathology.”

“I know.”

“Then destroy this.”

“I haven’t accused anyone.”

“Not aloud.”

Li closed the file.

He knew Qin was right.

Pattern recognition was both medicine’s gift and its trap.

The next time Zou entered Nuclear Medicine, he was the calm version.

He reviewed a complex orthopaedic oncology case with Li and asked about the limits of metabolic imaging. The conversation became unusually technical.

At one point, Zou said, “You know why I dislike you?”

Li looked up.

“I have a list.”

“You make uncertainty public.”

“That sounds healthy.”

“It is terrifying in institutions.”

For a moment, Zou looked tired rather than arrogant.

“People trust us because we act certain.”

“Patients trust us because they hope we are honest.”

“Those are not always the same thing.”

The exchange stayed with Li.

Two days later, Zou humiliated a junior surgeon in a corridor over a trivial administrative error and seemed to have forgotten half the details of their technical conversation.

Li watched him walk away.

I am not myself.

The phrase no longer felt like a teaching joke.